Estimated Reading Time: 11 Minutes
Here’s How We Gained Over 15,000 Visits in One Year With One Piece of Content

The benefits of writing quality travel content are endless; it’s a great way to engage with your audience, you can use it to help convert readers into customers, it builds your brand image and it helps with SEO. But sometimes it can be tempting just to bash out an easy 500 words on any topic that comes to mind, just so you’ve hit a wordcount and added something new to a blog.
The problem with this kind of content is that it serves no one; your audience won’t be interested in something that is carelessly written and doesn’t match their interests. More to the point, if you’re not writing content that people are searching for, nobody is going to be able to find it in the first place, and traffic to your site will remain unchanged.
The key to creating brilliant travel content that expands your audience and brings more attention to your website is a combination of imaginative writing and SEO knowledge. This post takes you through our technique for writing travel content that is optimised for search engine results pages so that it ranks as well as possible and generates more organic traffic than a bog-standard piece of travel writing.
15,036 Visits From One Piece of Content
To demonstrate how our approach to writing travel content has been successful, we’ll be using an example of a post that we created for our client Italy4Real based on the search term ‘Italy in November’.
This piece of content is still ranking on Page 1 for this search term after being published in 2018. In the past year, this post has generated 15,036 visits to the site through organic searches since it was published, with this traffic remaining pretty consistent over the past couple of years.
We’ve used this technique countless times to produce content for our clients that ranks highly and generates a large amount of organic traffic to their site. So get ready to take notes, and read on for our guide to writing travel content that search engines will love.
Start with Keyword Research
For every post that we write, we always start with keyword research. This is so that we can answer the question that will get us the most amount of traffic to our page as possible: what are people really searching for?
Two of the best ways to find good keyword phrases to target are to either analyse the phrases that competitor sites are already ranking for or use a keyword research tool to look for variants of certain words you would like to target. If you want to find out more about our process for keyword research, you can read a whole blog post about it here.
We also recommend this resource from Backlinko or this one from Ahrefs, which is also our favourite platform for keyword research.
Before you start looking for keywords however, it’s a good idea to try and get into the mind of your audience so that you have a good idea of the terms and phrases they might be searching for. Profiling your target audience will also help you get an idea of related topics that they also might be interested in that your competitors won’t be ranking for, which opens up even more ideas.
With our content for Italy4Real we decided to target what to do in Italy during certain months, as this was a great specific search that was different to the usual ‘What to do in Italy’ popular travel posts.
We used a keyword research tool to enter the phrase ‘Italy in’ followed by each month of the year, to first determine if they were well-searched for and then to identify which months had the best search volume. November was one of the most searched for months by users in the USA, where the client is based, so we had a good idea of how much traffic this blog post could generate when we published it.

Choose a Phrase to Target
From your keyword research, you should have been able to identify a topic that you will be focusing your piece of content on. From here, you’ll need to enter this term into a keyword research tool to generate all the different phrases this term is part of and see which of these people are searching for the most.
This will form the title of your content, as well as the URL and your headings.
Decide on a URL
You’ll want your URL to include the competitive phrase that you have decided to focus on, which in our case was simple ‘Italy in November’. With this in mind, our URL for this post was:
Including your target word or phrase in the URL has been proven to help a page rank better, so there’s no excuse not to. Try not to make your URL too long though, just include the words in a way that makes sense.
Map Out Your Structure
After you have used a keyword tool to identify your target phrase, you then want to use it to find variations of the phrase to inform the different sections of the content you write. For example…
As well as using a keyword tool, you can also do something as simple as entering your target phrase into Google and seeing what predicted searches appear underneath. Google generates these searches based on phrases that are semantically similar and also popular phrases that people search for, so it’s a really good way to identify what sub-topics and headings will help your content rank well.
Another good way to get ideas for the sections of your content is to enter your target phrase into Google and see what other articles come up. Choose pieces that are on page one and are coming from blogs that are a similar size to yours, and use the headings and subheadings of these posts to inspire what you write.
Wikipedia is also a great resource for finding related topics to your target phrase, as the contents for each page is well-structured and can give you lots of ideas of what else to include.
With our post for Italy4Real, we looked at the content of other pages that were currently ranking for our target phrase and identified that headings like ‘Weather in Italy in November’ and ‘November Festivals & Events In Italy’ were popular. We made sure to include these as sections in our post.

Features to Include
After you have settled on a keyword phrase and planned the structure of what you are going to write, the only thing you’ve got left is to put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) and get writing!
As well as crafting informed paragraphs of text however, there are other features you will need to add to your content to give it the best possible chance of ranking well. Google looks out for certain things to give it an idea of whether a post or page is well structured and informative, which we have detailed below.
Header Tags
One of the first things that a search engine is going to analyse is the header tag structure of your page, which lets it know how your content has been formatted.
In short, your title should be an H1 tag, the main headings on the page should be H2 tags, and any sub-headings under these should be H3 tags. You can see how this looked in our post structure below.
It can be tempting to mess around with the types of headings that you use so that your page looks nice, but you need to remember that this can mess with how the page is analysed and impact how well your content performs.
Introductory Paragraph
Your introductory paragraph should always contain your target phrase, as this helps give Google a better idea of what your post is about and can help to gain a featured snippet if your post makes it to the top spot on the page. Make sure the phrase fits in naturally to your introduction, and ideally try and include some other related keywords in there as well if you can, to give it an extra boost!
Internal Menu
As a reader, it can be very frustrating to have to crawl through a long blog post or article to try and find the relevant section you are interested in. Including a table of contents at the start of your post not only outlines what you’re going to be talking about and gives a reader the chance to skip ahead; it most importantly gives Google a clear idea of the page’s structure.
An internal menu is just made up of links that take you down to the relevant part of the page, but this can also help with your SEO ranking as it will give you site links in your search engine result which can improve clickthrough rate.
Images and Media
The key to good content is obviously high-quality writing, but there’s more than just words that make up what goes on a page. Images, bullet points, videos and FAQs all make the page more appealing to a reader, and a variety of different media can encourage them to stay on the page and your site for longer.
On the flip side of this however, you don’t want to fill your page with so much different stuff that it ends up taking an age to load. Remember to format and optimise your images so that the files are small but the picture is still clear, and only add five or six to an article to illustrate your points. If you’re including video as well, embed it from the site that it is hosted on so that they won’t take forever to load.

Internal Links
Having links within your site is a great way to boost your performance on search engine results pages for several reasons.
By linking to other related pages or posts from the content you are writing, you show that you are a site with lots of relevant information which helps Google to view you as an expert on the topic you are writing about. If you’re viewed as an expert you’re more likely to rank highly on results pages, so will gain more traffic.
From a user point of view as well, if you reach the end of a piece of content you have enjoyed and see links to other, relevant pieces of writing then you are likely to click on them right away. You can keep people on your site for longer and also direct them to certain pages through relevant content, which can be very beneficial if you have products or services you’re trying to sell.
External Links
Internal links give the impression that you are an expert on a certain topic, but something else that will aid this reputation is if you have added links to external sites that provide the user with further reading. We often use this technique in our work as an opportunity for outreach, as you can contact a site and tell them you have mentioned their work on your platform which may lead to shares or links coming from them.
Google also uses external links as a way of indexing all the content on the internet, so it likes websites which makes this easier. If Google likes your site, it’s more likely to rank higher, and you’ll get more organic traffic. Everyone’s happy!

Page Loading Speed
Once you’ve got all the text, images and links ready to go on your page, it’s a good idea to check that it loads quickly. You’ll lose a lot of your potential traffic if your site takes too long to load a page, and this can be the difference between a piece of content doing really well and getting barely any interest at all.
To ensure your page loads as fast as possible, compress all of your images, get all relevant caching in place and make sure that any videos are hosted properly. If this still isn’t working then you might have to remove some of the media or simplify the formatting of the page so that everything appears quickly.
Keyword Density
When you’re trying to write content with high-ranking keywords in mind, it can be tempting just to drop a certain phrase into your text as many times as you can. The problem with this is that it tends to result in writing that sounds forced or clunky, and makes the focus of the piece quite obvious to the reader.
Whilst we all want our content to perform as well as possible on search engine results pages, what should be at the top of our priority list is crafting content that benefits readers by delivering all the information they are looking for creatively and engagingly. If you’re following the advice we have listed here and focusing on writing an outstanding piece of content, your work will likely end up with the right number of relevant phrases and semantically similar terms that will help it to rank well, without a lot of forced effort.
It’s not as simple as inserting a key phrase into your writing a specific number of terms. Google does not follow a rigid formula when deciding which sites should be right at the top of a results page. But what you can do is give your content the best possible chance at ranking well by following the advice we have listed above.
Final Advice
With SEO content, a hard truth is that some of the writing you spend hours on might not rank as you wanted it to. There are many other factors at play than simply the phrases that you are targeting, and sometimes content just doesn’t work its way up the ranks for reasons we can’t explain.
Don’t despair though. If you keep at this formula for producing content and keep reading up on SEO techniques to give your writing the best possible chance, after a while you’re sure to start seeing results. Having just one or two of your pages listed on page one makes a big difference, and the more traffic your site gains the better the rest of your content will start ranking as well.
SEO isn’t a quick-fix solution; it takes time and effort to implement strategies into your website and content. But once the results start coming in there’s no stopping the growth that your business is likely to experience, and you can be certain that this increase will be sustainable.
As you can see from our content for Italy4Real, a single post has brought them over 15,000 visits in the past year, with even more traffic driven in the years before this. We also created a whole series of posts around this one detailing Italy in the other months of the year, many of which are also now ranking in position one and generating a great amount of traffic to the site.
This shows how following the same formula time and time again with your content creates a steady increase of traffic and improves the overall performance of your travel website on search engine results pages, again helping your business grow.
It can sometimes be tempting just to populate a blog with whatever you can think of for the sake of appearances, but this is just a waste of your time and talent. Instead, invest this time in planning and creating carefully structured content that you know your target audience will consume, and start seeing the changes it makes to your site’s traffic.